A Project Plan - The Time and Effort Involved in Acquiring a Language

I am glad we are putting lots of effort to teach our language to our kids. A noble effort. We want them to understand, speak, read, and write our language. A great goal. We need a workable plan. I discuss what it takes to acquire a language; the order, effort and time. Is what we are doing enough to meet this great goal? How to say? Let us compare with a benchmark. The benchmark is how we all acquired our first language. Using this as benchmark, we will be able to tell if we are investing enough to expect the expected return.

First let us understand the five stages of language acquisition. Please watch The Five Stages of Second Language Acquisition.

Here is the stages we went through when we acquired our first language. (the numbers can only be an approximate since the start time, and amount of time taken varies from kid to kid).

Stage#	Period	What happens	Rough Actual Time (in hours)	Notes
Stage 0 - Initial Stage	0 - 9 months	Surrounded by Language Language Exposure Parents and relatives talk to them They just listen and keep acquiring words and meanings	1000 hours	Awake 4 hours a day
Stage 1 - Preproduction Stage	9 - 12 months	Understand and respond to simple commands Has minimal comprehension Does not verbalize Nods "Yes" and "No" Draws and points	600 hours	Awake 6 hours a day
Stage 2 - Early production Stage	12 - 14 months	Very first words Has limited comprehension Produces one or two words Uses keywords and familiar phrases Uses present tense verbs	600 hours	Awake 4 hours a day
Stage 3 - Speech Emergence Stage	14 - 18 months	Use lots of words Makes lots of grammatical errors. Has good comprehension. Can produce simple sentences Makes grammatical and pronunciation errors Frequently understand jokes	500 hours	Awake 8 - 10 hours a day
Stage 4 - Intermediate Fluency Stage	?	Uses lots of sentences Makes few grammatical errors. Has excellent comprehension.	500 hours	Awake 8 - 10 hours a day
Stage 5 - Advanced Fluency Stage	?	Have a near perfect level of speech.	?	?

Only after mastering so much of language skill, we went to school to learn to read and write. This is the way the brain acquires the language and this is what it takes to acquire a language. Are we doing something similar to teach a second language or something else? If you are doing the same thing, congratulations. Otherwise, what is the reason?

Of course we can not afford the same luxury, time, and effort in teaching a second language in schools. But, that does not mean we can alter this order or take a short cut. It simply does not work.

There are techniques that will help us to replicate the first language experience in teaching second language and get the result close to the first language competency over time. If we are teaching our language in a different way, or that goes against the way the brain acquires the language, how do we expect the learners to acquire and master language skill?

காயை அடித்து கனியாக்க முடியாது அல்லவா?

"A language learning machine (a kid) , that can master a language effortlessly on it's own, struggles to acquire even the basic language skill from school that too with the help of an experienced language teacher." -- a very interesting quote.


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